4.43pm: How can we fix our politics? That's been the theme of the Guardian fringes at all the party conferences and tonight a panel of Tories are addressing the question. Ben Wallace, Tim Montgomerie, Nick Boles and Joanne Cash will be on the platform. They've written about their proposals for Comment is free and they will be developing their ideas tonight. Michael White will be in the chair and I'll be blogging the event live. We start at 5.30pm.

5.31pm: We're starting. Mike White says this won't be a normal general election because of the events of the last 12 months. Some people really do seem to think our politics is broken.

In the conference programme Alan Duncan is down as a speaker. But he accepted when he was shadow leader of the Commons. Then he got demoted. He said he would come anyway, but mysteriously got invited to another fringe, Mike explains.

5.35pm: Tim Montgomerie starts. He's got to leave just after 6pm.

The main problem with politics is that there is a sense among voters that, whoever gets elected, nothing will change. The most important challenge for political parties is to combat that notion.

It's hard for parties to make an announcement and to persuade voters that it's new. The Tories should "under promise and over deliver". If voters can then see "tangible progress", the Tories will begin to fix the broken political system.

Montgomerie pays tribute to Nick Boles, who is working on the "implementation unit", the Tory team preparing policy for after the election. Montgomerie says that's the solution.

Mike White sums up his contribution: "Govern better."

5.41pm: Nick Boles comes next. Picking up on something Mike said, he tells us he's glad that the most senior political sage on the Guardian thinks it's inevitable that the Tories will win the election. (Mike did not actually say that, but never mind.) Boles says that everyone else in the room will not agree, because they are not complacent. (I'm not sure he's right about that either.)

Voters are fed up with politics because they feel they have no influence over what happens, he says. He points out that, when people cast a vote, they have to weigh up a whole series of issues.

But when voters in London elected Boris Johnson last year, things did change. Boles cites Johnson's decision to force Sir Ian Blair to resign. That made a difference.

He would like to see this extended. Voters should have more control over decision-makers.

5.46pm: Joanne Cash starts with a story about meeting a young man in her constituency (or the constituency she's fighting - Westminster North) who turned up to a job club and said that he had no skills. But, by the end of the session, he realised that he did have something to write on his CV. The helper supporting him had explained that, if he coached a football team (as he did), he had leadership skills. Cash cites this as an example of how community projects can make a real difference to people's lives.

She says she runs various programmes of this kind in the constituency. She does not advertise them as Conservative initiatives. She launched them because she decided she wanted to "leave something behind" if she did not get elected. But it has made a difference politically. Tory councillors are starting to get elected.

Incidentally, she lets slip that she's a libel barrister.

"Without the engagement of the public, we simply won't matter," she says.

That's interesting. Tory PPCs are involved in about 150 "social action projects", I've been told. But I've never heard one describe how these actually work, as Cash has just done.

5.52pm: Ben Wallace is the final speaker. He says that he's a new dad and that, consequently, he's been up late at night watching the parliament channel. On it, he watched the How can we fix politics? fringe meeting at the Labour conference. Labour panellists were mostly interested in fixing the Labour party, he says.

Wallace says transparency is the answer to most problems. He used to work in the military and he knows about proper secrets. But most things that are kept secret should not be. Transparency would be a solution.

Wallace published all his expenses online a year before MPs were forced to disclose them. He did not do so because he thought he was perfect. He thought it was the right thing to do.

There's also a need to "fix our politicians", he says. The Tories have gone some way to address this, by choosing a wider range of candidates. But there is not enough leadership in public life. There are too many MPs who have never done anything else.

Wallace also says that one of his jobs is to manage expectations. He should be able to tell people that he "can't fix their pothole".

That leads to his final point. Empowering people. Couple that with transparency, and you will go a long way to fixing politics, he says.

5.59pm: We're onto questions.

Guy Aitchison, from Power 2010, says all the solutions have been a bit tame.

A second questioner asks if politicians have the knowledge they need to give advice to voters. Are there too many arts-educated generalists?

Tim Montgomerie says doing the wrong thing is worse than timidity. PR would be a mistake, a "terrible response" to the crisis. We might lose the link between MPs and their constituencies. Extreme parties would benefit; the BNP would love it. And we would end up with coalition government, which would mean no one would get the kind of government they wanted.

Montgomerie talks about candidate selection. The Tories have not achieved the diversity in background that they need. He does not think the A list has helped much.

Michael White asks the audience if they think that there are too many people now who go into politics with no experience of anything else. A few people in the audience say they agree.

6.06pm: Mike White asks Tim Montgomerie, who has to go in a moment, if the internet offers a solution. Montgomerie, of course, edits ConservativeHome.

Montgomerie says that the internet has broken the "monopoly of comment".

It has not made a real difference to fundraising. But it's possible that a new political party could be born on the internet. If the conventional political parties do not respond to voters' concerns, they could be threatened by an "insurgency" on the internet, Montgomerie says.

6.09pm: Ben Wallace says that he was one of the first Tories to be elected under PR. He was an MSP for four years. He does not approve. It gave the Lib Dems disproportionate influence. A minority of Scots voted for them, but they were in power for eight years. He also says that PR meant MSPs were more worried about the views of party members than about the views of voters.

Joanne Cash mentions the media, and Andrew Marr in particular. She says he should not have asked Gordon Brown about the pill-popping rumours and that he should not have asked David Cameron about his wealth, and his wife's salary. Politicians should not have to answer questions like that, she says.

Bad news for Andrew Marr. You don't want to get on the wrong side of a libel lawyer.

Mike White asks the audience what they think. On a show of hands, most of them agree with Cash.

6.15pm: More questions. Jonathan Baume, the First Division Association general secretary, asks about the relationship between parliament and the executive.

Someone asks about morality and my colleague John Harris asks about localism.

On localism, Nick Boles says he remembers the poll tax (or community charge, as he calls it). Changing local government finance creates losers, and that is unpopular. The Tories would give local councils more power over their spending. He would love to shift the balance towards local govenrment much further. But it would take a long time. "Give us 20 years in government and we'll get there," he says.

6.21pm: Joanne Cash says she's very much in favour of localism. She is fighting a seat in Westminster. She would like Westminster council to have more power.

In response to the morality question, Cash says it's for others to judge whether politicians are moral. But she's open about what she's done and what she thinks. She publishes information on her website. And she's on Twitter.

Ben Wallace says politicians should take more responsibility for what they do. There are some ministers who should have resigned for their policy mistakes. This gets a cheer from the audience.

On the issue of MPs' expenses, Wallace says that what some MPs did was "wrong". Some of his colleagues did not accept this. He was shouted at in the Commons lobby for his stance and the chief whip did not speak to him for six weeks.

Most MPs are honest and decent, he says. But there are a "few crooks", Wallace says.

MPs do need expenses and allowances to enable them to do their job. Wallace gets applauded for this too.

6.28pm: Another round of questions.

Someone asks if politicians have the courage to take unpopular decisions.

A second questioner, from Germany, says British politics is too centralised.

Mike takes a third question. "Man at the back." Turns out it's not a man. It's Melanie Phillips, from the Daily Mail. She asks Nick Boles how he would decentralise power without giving groups like the BNP the chance to influence bodies like the police.

Nick Boles says he used to live in Germany. He liked it, but did not like the "obsessive legalisms". You can get arrested there for crossing the road at the wrong point, he says.

Britain has some things to learn from Germany. But not PR. Politicians are chosen by the parties, and they often have no links with their constituency. And PR allowed the Free Democrats to stay in power for 50 years. (Although Boles says he likes the Free Democrats. If he lived in Germany, he would support them.)

In response to Melanie Phillips, Boles says he has more faith in the British people than she did. If the BNP were going to win an election of that kind, people would come from all over the country to campaign against them. He would urge people to vote Labour if a BNP victory was the alternative.

Ben Wallace says PR in the Scottish parliament did not bring politicians closer to the public.

Mike White asks if he approved of the Scottish parliament. In some ways, yes, says Wallace. In some respects it does things better. It can debate any issue, not just those within its control.

On the BNP question, Wallace says he disagrees with Boles. Wallace represents a Lancashire constituency. He thinks there would be a prospect of the BNP winning an election to appoint a police commissioner. He would prefer to see prosecutors elected.

Mike asks Joanne Cash, the lawyer, about this. She says she would be "very, very opposed" to politicising our legal system, which she describes as one of the best in the world.

6.41pm: More questions.

Someone suggests people would trust politicians more if they gave more straight answers.

Another questioner suggests Britain needs an "Obama moment" - something dramatic that overturns assumptions about what is possible.

Nick Boles says he agrees with the questioner who made the point about Barack Obama. Boles is a "huge fan" of Obama's, he says. He went to his convention and want to his inaugural. But Obama has raised unrealistic expectations. He will not be able to fulfill them. David Cameron should be wary of following in the footsteps of Tony Blair. Blair raised great hopes in 1997, and people were disappointed with what happened.

On the subject of giving straight answers, Boles says that's harder than it looks. Ken Clarke makes it look easy. But he can do it because he's "smarter than a bag of monkeys".

Joanne Cash says she admires Ken Clarke too. But she brings it back to the media. Interviewers expect "yes/no" answers. And they don't give politicians the time to answer questions properly.

The fixing of politicians will be a joint enterprise. Politicians, voters and journalists will all have to be involved, she says.

Mike White says he works with journalists and politicians. Of the two groups, politicians are more honest, because they are more accountable.

He also says it's not easy to give straight answers. "If I told you everything I think privately, I would be off the frontbench in five minutes."

People want blunt politicians. But they also like unified parties. There's a contradiction there, he says.

Joanne Cash says politicians need reasonable voters. People cannot expect expensive services, for example, without being willing to fund them. The media should be willing to facilitate debates of this kind, she says.